North Korea Fires Projectile Toward East Sea as US Midterm Results Start Rolling In

North Korea fired an unidentified projectile toward the East Sea on Wednesday local time, according to Yonhap. The launch landed as the first projected results from the US midterm election began trickling in. Seoul has not yet said what exactly flew or how far it went.

The timing is hard to miss. Pyongyang has spent recent weeks stacking up missile activity, including a launch on Oct. 29 that South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said sent an unidentified projectile toward the Sea of Japan, known in South Korea as the East Sea. That one followed a test firing of multiple ballistic missiles from the Pyongyang area earlier in October.

On Nov. 1, North Korea announced it had tested a cluster warhead designed to ride on a ballistic missile, per the Korean Central News Agency. General Kim Jong Sik, a Central Military Commission member and first vice department director of the Workers' Party Central Committee, oversaw the test, the country's Missile General Bureau said. The bureau claimed the test confirmed the warhead could devastate a target area.

Diplomatically, the North isn't blinking either. Its Foreign Ministry insisted on Oct. 31 that international sanctions will never force it to give up its nuclear status, telling KCNA that the measures are doomed to go bankrupt. The statement came after 11 countries and the European Union issued a joint push of their own.

There's a cyber thread too. Kim Yo-jong, sister of leader Kim Jong-un, called allegations that Pyongyang was behind a $6.3 billion cyberattack on Binance absurd rhetoric, according to the BBC. She framed the claim as a grave political provocation, while the FBI had previously pinned the hack on the North Korean group TraderTraitor.

For now, the projectile's type and trajectory remain unknown. Expect Seoul and Washington to fill in the blanks in the coming hours, with the US election news cycle as an unusually loud backdrop.